Primetime all week here on cspan. And now, a hearing on Older Workers and their impact on the labor market and the economy. Topics discussed included challenges in returning to the workforce, additional training and education and Retirement Savings. Don buyer chaired this hearing. I want to thank all of our truly distinguished witnesses for sharing their expertise. Let me turn to my brief opening statement. Without question, Older Workers are vital to our collective prosperity. Im not just saying that because i am 71 years old. They support families and communities nationwide, bring decades of earned experience and wisdom to businesses to places large and small. Older americans made up 40 of the National Economic output despite making up only 30 of the population. This year, Older Workers have almost doubled. A trend is set to continue even after the pandemic. As the United States continues a strong recovery, Congress Must be asking how a stronger economy can be built. The key is a better labor market that ensures all work as including all workers that Older Workers have access to quality jobs. Over the past year, the u. S. Economy has experienced record job growth. Over 6. 6 million new jobs were created in 2021 and almost one million more anyway 11. In the spring of 2020, unemployment was nearing almost 10 . The widespread availability of vaccines and testing. Even as we recognize the recordbreaking economic accomplishment in the last year, we must also address the ways our recovery has not yet reached everyone including Older Workers. Older workers have long faced unique challenges in the workforce in these challenges were exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Diminishing returns from additional years of working an increasingly strenuous and dangerous jobs have contributed to widespread economic insecurity among Older Workers and constricted broadbased economic growth. The pandemic has also shined a new light on the inadequacy of our care infrastructure to help Older Workers navigate work and care responsibilities. This has been particularly harmful to older black and hispanic women. For example, one third of Home Health Aides are aged 55 and older. Yet Care Industry wages are low and care work is very physically demanding. This makes an untenable situation for aging providers as they are simultaneously less physically able to continue their work but also unable to save and retire securely. More than one in five workers aged 45 to 64 reports being a caregiver to a parent. If the United States does not guarantee any workers the right to paid leave, and Older Workers even less likely than younger counterparts to have access to paid six days sick days. This forces many workers to make the impossible choice between caring themselves and a loved one and getting a paycheck which harms workers, businesses and the broader economy. Today, we are seeing these decadelong trends impacting Older Workers coming to a head. Just as companies have historically used downturns, the same appears to be true of the coronavirus recession. At least 1. 7 million more Older Workers than expected retire due to the pandemic recession. The effects have been particularly harmful for older black workers and those without a college degree. Older workers choose to spend more time with hobbies and families. This is not a reality for many Older Workers. The reality is over the course of the pandemic, many Older Workers have been forced out of jobs, to live on insufficient retirement out income. For the first time in 50 years, the Unemployment Rate of Older Workers was higher than that of than those of midcareer workers. Because our economy system is not kept up with the needs of the aging workforce, the typical worker in the United States has zero Retirement Savings. No Retirement Savings at all. Among those that do, the amount of holy is wholly insufficient to maintain a preretirement of living. Research shows they will experience significant barriers to be rehired particularly in recessionary periods. They face discrimination and stigma. No worker should be forced in the early retirement and at the same time, no one should be forced to work long into their golden years time no one should be forced to work long into their golden years because of insufficient savings. Addressing these challenges in order to help build a better labor market for Older Workers and create a stronger economy is central to our work. I look forward to this discussion with our accurate with our expert witnesses and learning from them today. Let me introduce senator lee from utah. The floor is yours. Sen. Lee Older Americans are the bedrock of our community. It is hard to overstate their role. We rely on grandparents for everything, from helping to care for our children to building your churches and volunteering in local charities. Increasingly Older Americans also make vital contributions in the workforce. Many of americas seniors and more and more of them are choosing to work because they find work to be a source of engagement and meeting. A fellow utahan was missing the social connections and professional satisfaction associated with being at work after being out of the job for the last two years. Like so many other Older Americans, when he started looking for a job again, he thought he would never be able to get a leg up navigating the endless changes that would be brought about by the pandemic. That is when we saw story about return utah. A Great Program to help utahans who are looking for work after an extended absence. He was surprised to find the utah office of Energy Development needed someone with his technical skills. Elizabeth hist his story is inspiring. As many choose to work longer Older Americans are doing better than they ever have before thanks to improved health and less physically demanding jobs. Many Older Americans remaining in the workforce longer and more employers are benefiting from their reliability and their experience. Older americans who choose to retire are also better set up for Economic Security than ever before. Americans have never saved more or have more for their golden years. Poverty among seniors is lower than any other age group. The preliminary indicator is those who left work during the pandemic did so because they can better afford to retire. Older workers are doing remarkably well. What Older Workers do not need our new special interest programs and policies cooked up in washington and delivered halfbaked by bureaucrats from thousands of miles away. Lets fix whats broken. Government spending is still the highest inflation rate this country has seen in four decades , and it is turning all americans, including our seniors , Government Programs intended to care for seniors often punish those who want to stay connected to the workforce longer. The threat of Vaccine Mandates continues to hang over the country, cruelly forcing americans to choose between the freedom to make their own Health Decisions and their jobs. Ultimately a thriving unencumbered economy is the best way to allow Older Americans to make their choices and make those choices that are best suited for themselves and for their families, whether that is spending more time with the kids and the grandkids, volunteering for the local congregation, maintaining a long healthy work life or all of the above. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses of how we can foster this type of prosperity. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now i would like to introduce our distinguished witnesses. One serves as a professor of economics and policy analysis at the new school for social research. She works at the Schwartz Center she is a labor economist and nationally recognized author and experts in economics and security. She offers various solutions to growing retirement crisis. Dr. Monique morris is an economist for the Economic Policy institute. She worked to the fl cio. And has written extensively about Retirement Security, compensation, and financial markets. In recent work examined the effects of the covid pandemic on Older Workers and ways to ensure they can fully participate in recovery. She received her phd in economics from american university. Prior to this role she was a senior fellow at the center for american progress. Before her time in the senate she worked in the white house under president obama, serving as Deputy Assistant to the president and director of policy and special projects for michelle obama. She is an expert on policies that would improve the quality of work for women and Older Workers and their families. She is a graduate of harvard law school. His work focuses on Social Security reform, state and local government pensions, and Public Sector pay and benefits. Dr. Biggs served as the Principal Deputy commissioner of the Social Security ministration in 2007 and into thousand five he was associate director of the White House National where he worked on Social Security reform. He received a phd in government from the London School of economics. Lets begin with your testimony and will continue in the order of introductions. The floor is yours. Thank you, chairman buyer, and Ranking Member lee and all of the other Committee Members who showed up. You are about to tackle the special issues the nation faces as nearly half of the 11 million or 12 million new jobs projected to be created by 2020, a half of those jobs will be filled with workers over 55. The stair the scale means they dominate conditions of the labor market. For a small minority of Older Workers, about 11 , we have great news. They still work though they have more than enough to retire on. Those jobs are compelling and decently paid. Older workers do not face those conditions. Older workers are likely to be working more than younger workers. About one third of older nonwhite workers earned under 15 an hour, making them working poor. Older workers stopped being paid for their experience and loyalty. The risk and return for working one extra years has fallen in the last 30 years. For some Older Workers, technology might make their work easier, but technology can also intensify work. As computers some of our most robust sectors thrive on low wage Older Workers. Think about Janitorial Service and warehousing more Older Workers are required to concentrate and use keen eyesight and more Older Workers are required to do physical labor. About 14 of older black man arent in physically demanding jobs. More Older Workers are working but despite all of that the u. S. Has one of the highest elderly poverty rates, and all of that work coupled with unequal longevity gains means American Workers have the fewest years in retirement. Black men can expect 13 years. While most workers in the g7 have well over 22 years of retirement and they have a small poverty rate. More Older Workers want to work but about half of workers and middleclass households will be downwardly mobile into poverty or near poverty in the next 10 years. That is because the median account balance for Older Workers is 15,000. Even if they wanted to work, most retirees are forced out of the labor force. The majority say they were forced to retire much earlier than they expected. Dynamic markets defined by bargaining relationships and power. A nobel economist observed that when a growing group of people, Older Workers, do not have the basic capacity to retire, they do not have the power to bargain for better jobs. If Older Workers have more borrowing power, one third of the younger family members providing time and money to their elders would get relief. If Older Workers had more Marketing Power communities would spend less on fragile elders and they would have more marketing demand in their community and that helps the recession. If Older Workers have more Bargaining Power we would reward the employers doing the right thing, those employers that train and pay Older Workers well. Finally Older Workers have more power to improve the Retirement Income security. You may hear about rosie models that conclude working longer solves everything, especially helping Retirement Income. Those models wrongly assume something i thought was always true, but is wrong. Older workers, instead of saving for retirement and delaying claiming Social Security, Older Workers are claiming Social Security while they are working and drawing down their savings. The truth about the conditions Older Workers work mean the idea of working longer is not as complex is not as costless as we thought. It is quite costly. Congress could help Older Workers. They could form an Older Workers bureau like they formed the womens bureau. It could look at the research and recommend symptoms for the issues we will look at, including the highest level of perceived age discrimination in the last 30 years, probably the pandemic accelerated this. I created a plan with former president trumps chief economist and the economic innovation group, and that plan provides a government savings to workers in the bottom half of the distribution. This Savings Vehicle works alongside and is modeled after the federal savings plan. Good help boost the memo wage, expand union rights, and increasing sickly. Higher pay creates a virtuous circle. Congress can also make medicare the first payer and that will lower the cost of Health Insurance for employers. Strengthening older worker borrowing power helps more than Older Workers. Better jobs for older people improve productivity for the whole economy, it helps younger family members, it helps aging communities, those regions of the country with lots of older people stabilize their spending power, and all workers get the leverage they need to improve their jobs. Thank you. Thank you very much and for the very concrete policy ideas. Thank you members of the committee for inviting me to participate. My name is Monique Morrissey and i am an economist at the Economic Policy institute, a nonpartisan think tank created in 1986 to include the need of middle and lower aged workers. The pandemic recession was unusual. It was triggered by social distancing in response to the pandemic, which affected labor supply and demand. Services are concentrated in leisure and hospitality while caregiving responsibility loomed large. Older workers Labor Force Participation increased as they delayed retirement in response to falling asset values. In contrast, homeowners and 401 k participants benefited from rising asset, leading to an income among some clerk alleged workers. Workers ages 55 and older. A more typical recession Older Workers were less likely to work in occupations and industrys most affected by the pandemic, but they were more likely to leave jobs due to health risks. Job losses were greater among vulnerable groups including women, workers of color, noncollege workers comp and parttime workers. A robust federal response including relief checks and expanded Unemployment Benefits brought about rapid recovery despite the pandemics persistence.